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Features
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Sixty Years of Cinema
It began with journalists booing an American director’s contribution to the compilation film Chacun Son Cinema and ended with Roman Polanski excoriating them for their dumb questions.
Friday, May 25, 2007 at 4:00 PM
By J. Sperling Reich
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George Pimentel/WireImage.com
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A truly staggering collection of filmmaking talent
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When Cannes Film Festival President Gilles Jacob invited the thirty-three filmmakers responsible for a special 60th anniversary celebration film, Chacun Son Cinema, to the gala premiere, he surely didn’t expect nearly all of them to show up. But there they were on the first Sunday of this year's event, a veritable who’s who of festival luminaries, standing together on stage in a fitting tribute to this great annual event.
In alphabetical order, the directors charged with creating three-minute films - no longer, no shorter – about the history and current state of movie theaters and cinema are:
Theo Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Youssef Chahine, Chen Kaige, Michael Cimino, Ethan & Joel Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Manoel De Oliveira, Raymond Depardon, Atom Egoyan, Amos Gitai, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Andrei Konchalovsky, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Raoul Ruiz, Walter Salles, Elia Suleiman, Tsai Ming Liang, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar Wai and Zhang Yimou.
Quentin Tarantino was asked to contribute but couldn’t because he was working on Death Proof, while David Lynch submitted his entry too late to be included in the compilation, thought it was shown before Sunday night’s screening. Some of the filmmakers attending this special occasion met others for the first time. All agreed that making a three-minute short film for Chacun Son Cinema is a far different challenge than that of a full-length feature film.
Perhaps Michael Cimino should have taken that into better consideration. His short was roundly booed by journalists at an early morning preview screening, bringing back memories of Heaven’s Gate.
“The price of every image is much higher,” explains Russian filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky of the short filmmaking process during a press conference attended by FilmStew. “You have so few images to tell this story; that means every image should be priceless otherwise it shouldn’t be there. Of course the art of making film with priceless images are gone with MTV.”
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George Pimentel/WireImage.com
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Is that all you got?
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For his part, Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, whose Babel made a big splash at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, compared the difference between features and shorts to the sport of boxing. “In a feature, you can win over with points during the 12 or 15 rounds,” he posits. “But in a short film, you have to win by knockout. There should not be one second that should not be there.”
Many of the filmmakers attending the gala and special anniversary dinner seemed truly honored to meet one another, in some cases for the first time. For example, Canadian director Atom Egoyan told the Paris-based Roman Polanski that it was the latter’s short films which compelled him to want to be a filmmaker. While Polanski was flattered by Egoyan’s compliment, he was visibly annoyed by the generally lame questions put forth by attending journalists.
“It’s a very rare opportunity to see a group of directors like this all sitting here in a row, facing an audience of film critics and it’s a shame to have such poor questions, such empty questions,” he says angrily. “I think it’s really the computer which has brought you down to this level and you are no longer interested in what’s going on in the cinema. Frankly, let’s all go and have lunch.”
And with that, Polanski got up and walked out of the press conference, leaving his fellow directors behind to answer one or two more questions before they joined him, presumably for lunch.
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